When You Talk About Black People And Crime

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Listening to an interview on CNN and a representative from NYPD, I felt the familiar twinge of irkdom. There is always somebody quick to speak about crime in the black community, particularly in urban areas. Like the Sheriff in Wisconsin talking about why we have no outrage when black people kill other black people. I want to punch someone in the face. Do you know why?

Because:

1. White people kill other white at the same statistical rate. You commit crimes against those people to whom you have access. So yeah, black people rob, rape, and kill other black people because that is who they LIVE around. Just like how white people rob, rape, and kill other white people because their neighbors are white.

3. Police brutality and quickness to use harsher tactics toward black people is REAL. This issue is MUTUALLY exclusive from any concerns that anyone has about crime in their neighborhood. The tendency to bring up crime in an area as a DEFENSE or DEFLECTION from officers treating black people differently speaks volumes about what your thoughts about race truly are.

4. Saying that a problem exists in the way you interact with the people you should protect and serve does not mean activists hate police or want them dead. It means that we want you to do your job fairly and without the bias that makes you shoot to kill me but talk a white man down and take him in alive.

5. If black people thought for ONE SECOND that we could trust the police to do right by our sons and daughters and mothers and fathers, we would help you clean up our neighborhoods. But we will never entrust you with the secrets we keep because we are more afraid of you than we are of the criminals in our neighborhood. We are afraid you really won’t help. We are afraid that you will not follow through because you have failed to follow through so many times before.

6. Black people as a RACE are not criminals. But just like every other group of people, we have bad eggs. Yet our entire value and worth has been unfairly tied to the bad behavior of a few, then amplified through constant play in the media by only showing black criminals or implying that if we die it was because we may have done criminal things… Or maybe we just LOOK like what you think a black criminal looks like.

Until YOU stop attaching crime to my race ubiquitously, you will never treat us right.